Summer Issue of Asian Perspective

We are pleased to announce the publication of Asian Perspective, volume 50, number 3 (Summer 2026) published by Johns Hopkins University Press for the Institute for Far Eastern Studies of Kyungnam University and made available online at Project Muse.

In this issue, seven regular submission articles cover aspects of China’s environment, East Asian security, and South Korean history and society. On the theme of China’s environment, the first article examines the PRC’s chemical industry, looking specifically at the country’s coal-based fertilizer production and use, and why this matters for understanding Beijing’s efforts to combat global climate change. The second article examines the question of how China practises its activity in global environmental governance, particularly its engagement in biodiversity governance, and questions whether Beijing has been demonstrating a leadership or laggard role, inter alia, in this endeavour. Shifting to East Asian security, three articles tackle questions of alliance, alignment, and responses to grey zone tactics in the region. The first contribution asks whether the China-Russia-North Korea triangle represents an alignment or an axis, finding a lack of cohesion and formal military commitments in their arrangement, distrust between Beijing and Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang, and a lag in their combined military capabilities compared to their main competitor, the US-South Korea-Japan trilateral partnership. The second contribution examines the limits that geography poses to Japan-ROK security alignment, finding that Seoul and Tokyo’s strategic cooperation is likely limited to an auxiliary role backing the United States. The third contribution employs a neoclassical realist perspective to explore Japan’s institutionalization of Maritime Domain Awareness as a non-military response to China’s gray zone tactics in the Indo-Pacific. The final two articles in the issue look at aspects of South Korean history and the situation of North Korean defectors within society. The first article contributes to studies on authoritarianism by conducting a comparative, individual level quantitative analysis on the elite volatility in the military dictatorships of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo-hwan. The second—and final article of the issue—provides a thorough examination of the health status and economic assimilation of North Korean defectors in South Korean society.

The issue also features our regular ‘Book Symposium’, this time on Van Jackson and Michael Brenes’ excellent study, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (Yale University Press, 2025).

All back issues of the journal (from 1977 to 2026), including past special issues, are also available at Project Muse (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/733).